I'll catch the first part of that one, and that pertains to the observation about perhaps not having a plan 13 years ago.
I suspect that anyone who looked 13 years ago at the people who were forecasting where the economy would be today.... They would have never forecast that the economy would be in the kind of healthy shape it is today, that the employment ratio would be at a record level, that the unemployment rate would be at a 32-year low. I suspect that very few would have considered that a plan would have been necessary to improve on the kinds of outcomes we have now.
I'm also a bit concerned, having been in the forecasting business for most of my career, about the perils of relying heavily on plans that are hostage to a set of assumptions that are in a forecast that you might make at any one point in time. For instance, if you go back even six or seven years ago, we talked a lot about the shift of the economy to the knowledge-based economy and what that would mean and what that would require in terms of the response of governments. And the reality is that in the last several years the more traditional parts of the economy--the resource sector, the energy sector--are generating tremendous job growth as well, so we've actually had a shift back towards a more balanced mix of employment growth, including considerable employment growth for people in the trades.
One of the things we have to bear in mind is the imperfection of forecasting and the necessity of building a broad foundation for the future. So I consider, just as an example of this, the fact that despite the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last several years, the unemployment rate in the manufacturing sector has not gone up, and that is, the unemployment rate of people who were unemployed and said they were in the manufacturing sector. So clearly a lot of those people are finding work elsewhere. And I think their educational level plays an important role in it.
In 1976 nearly half of manufacturing employees had less than high school education. Now nearly half of them have completed post-secondary education. So that shift in the educational calibre of the Canadian workforce is essential to a more adaptive workforce. And I think that's probably the most important contribution policy can make to creating the flexibility within the workforce, because the flexibility comes from people's skill sets, perhaps more so than from plans.